In order to provide video surveillance of a wide area at high resolution, a conventional surveillance system employs many cameras, each emplaced at a different location throughout the scene being surveilled. Each camera has its own pan, tilt and zoom mechanism, and is connected to its own video feed at a video operator control console.
This approach has several problems. First, the spatial resolution of available cameras is not fine enough to cover a wide area at high resolution. Thus, the user must choose whether to zoom in or out using a particular camera. Zooming out provides wide area coverage, but makes the resolution insufficient to identify faces or other important features. Zooming in provides high resolution images, but creates significant gaps in video surveillance coverage of the scene. Furthermore, tying each camera to an individual video view creates many disparate views of the scene, which can be confusing and overwhelming for a single end user or require multiple users to monitor.
In addition, the spatial resolution of images acquired by conventional surveillance systems varies with the distance to the target and the particular optical arrangement of the cameras. Thus, not all imagery collected by conventional surveillance systems is suitable for target tracking, pattern (face) recognition, etc.